The general idea behind DrJava is to provide powerful development tools that are as easy to use as possible. For this reason, we try to make DrJava easy to run and easy to understand, through a simple user interface with few panes and a legible toolbar. Meanwhile, we want to help novice users become comfortable with writing Java code by allowing them to quickly evaluate expressions in DrJava's Interactions Pane. All of our powerful features try to build on this simple and interactive interface.

The rest of this chapter will walk you through downloading and running DrJava, but if you have the DrJava .jar file, you can just double-click it to get started.